USA > Massachusetts > Hampden County > Springfield > Springfield, 1636-1886 : history of town and city, including an account of the quarter-millennial celebration at Springfield, Mass., May 25 and 26, 1886 > Part 51
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The best recipe I have ever read for casting cannon was to take a great hole and pour iron all around it. It is satisfactory, because no matter how frequently you may fail, the hole remains uninjured ; and so you have your hole left (your beautiful Springfield), although the federal metal has refused to wreathe around it. What more do you need to make glorious this anniversary? Of far more importance are the ability, the integrity, and the honor of the municipal rules of the grand old city, than any federal aggrandizements, or enlargements, or acces- sories. It is of far graver import to you by whom, and by what principles and what men your city shall be governed, than who shall be President of the United States. The conviction of Alderman Jaehne is of more value to the future his- tory of New York City than the distribution of federal patronage for the next fifty years. [Applause. ] Yon have no scandal or stain on your municipal life. You stand here to-day looking back on your faint beginnings, made impressive by the dust that time has scattered over them, tracing your happy history to the present time, prond that your inheritance has not been made pathetic by sin, or a sor- rowing memory by wrong. What better purpose, what higher pride can you have. than to keep unsullied the estate bequeathed to you?
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MR. LATHROP. - In the early days, when the wise men of the East in Massa- chusetts were projecting their political plans and purposes of state, they never decided important affairs until the " River Gods" of the Connecticut valley were consulted and heard from. Massachusetts has returned to her early custom. The " river gods" are yet here, and potent in the politics and the material con- cerns of the Commonwealth. In response to our call, our friend, neighbor, and governor graces our occasion.
GOVERNOR ROBINSON. - Mr. President and Gentlemen, - In behalf of Massa- chusetts, whom you delight so cordially to honor, I receive your testimonial, and shall bear it with me as your tribute. It comes not to me personally, for what- ever is accorded to the Governor of the State is official, and goes to the people as a whole and the government of which he is so justly proud. My friend and neighbor on my left has spoken so eloquently of the whole United States of America that he has taken in the domain of Massachusetts, and still more closely the little village of Chicopee. Indeed, there is little left for me to say, and perhaps it will be all the more grateful to your ears and patience, for I know you are already advanced two hundred and fifty years, with all the feebleness that comes with it, so you cannot bear very much at this hour, and I shall part with you with only a brief delay. Fortunately no one person present speaks for Massachusetts. She has voices in every town and city and at every point of her borders. For the time being one man stands officially for her, but everywhere her voice is heard. You have here at this board a long array of men, armed and equipped, impatient at the delay, to speak for the good old Commonwealth. It will be my gratification, therefore, to give them that opportunity, having already said in another place to-day something in her behalf. The toast-master has alluded to the place of my home, and it may not be out of place for me to speak of Chicopee ; to speak of her quietude, her good-fellowship, and her good citizenship. Her mark in life has not been made in this year, but far back, before she was separated from the good old town of Springfield. In fact, her attachment is so strong that she has drawn many others within the borders of her first settlement. My friend Stearns and myself, while we could not woo the mother, have loved her daughter, and we love her still. Though we live on the opposite sides of the street we are never jealous of our attachment to her, and never dare to say which thinks more of her. It is the home and the place of men who this year and in many other years that are gone have made their mark on the business, the mercantile, and the governmental prosperity of the Commonwealth. Do you need to be told in Springfield that your great man who led the way of transportation in western Massachusetts found his birth in
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Chicopee? So it is not alone in the present year that the men of Chicopee have been in the front and have gone into all parts of the State and country. Do you say that because Chicopee isn't a good place to live in? No, Chicopee is apt to say that they have gone because their presence was needed elsewhere, and they have gone where their strength was wanted. [Applause. ] You may go north- ward from here, but you will find no natural line between Springfield and Chicopee. There is no actual separation between the two. Man may have tried to put them asunder, but God has joined them indissolubly, and there they stand, city and town, elose together. She on the north has sought no other alliance since she parted with you temporarily, and she will not seek another. But if she does, it will be a reunion with the good old town of Springfield. Whatever makes for the advancement of the city of Springfield contributes to the glory of Chicopee, and in everything that shows her prosperity rejoices our hearts. I thank you for your indulgence, and gladly give way to others who are to follow.
Ex-Mayor WILLIAM H. HAILE, responding to the toast "The City of Springfield," said : -
I am asked to respond to a toast which has been assigned to another, and to whom we should have all gladly listened; but, at the same time, I have the feeling that any citizen who at such a time as this should refuse to respond to a call to appear in behalf of Springfield, even at the eleventh hour, would be a subject for proper discipline. This city may be pardoned if she seem to-night to be a little boastful. Our cup of joy is nearly full. and if we could have been made a port of delivery. I think it would have overflowed. Let us hope that our senior senator and the representative from this district in Con- gress may yet persuade our President that for once he has made a mistake. This is Springfield's day, and she is proud of it. We do not wish to detract from the history of other towns, but we claim in various ways a somewhat remarkable record for ourselves, as regards growth, sound finances, and intellectual develop- ment, and we are surrounded by a galaxy of beautiful daughters. We believe that Springfield has a promising future. Relying on an overruling Providence, our people have but to do their duty, and we shall advance to a point of eminence which we ean scarcely realize to-night. Thus we look into the future thankfully and hopefully.
President A. E. PILLSBURY, responding to the toast " The Massa- chusetts Senate," said : -
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Mr. Chairman, Mr. Toast-master, Citizens, and Guests of Springfield, -- It gives me pleasure to be with you on this festal occasion, and to add to the over- flowing congratulations which attend it, those of the less numerous and more modest branch of the Commonwealth's Congress, as you have styled it. I was pained to observe, Mr. Toast-master, that in calling on me to speak for that body you did not favor us, saving an allusion to our dignity, with any expressions of complement such as you have liberally bestowed elsewhere. This was, doubt- less, an oversight, for you know that the Legislature has many virtues. We frequently manage to get through a day's session without doing any serious mischief. And if the good people of Massachusetts generally knew how much mischief we are asked to do, and how much of that we refrain from doing, they would look upon the Legislature with a respect which, I fear, that much-abused body has never commanded in their eyes. The strength of your own represen- tation there is one of the most creditable features of your history in the two centuries and a half whose completion you celebrate to-day. With the earlier part of that history I am bound to confess I am little familiar ; but in late years one of your most remarkable qualities, as it appears to us who live in the eastern part of the State, is the facility with which you acquire, and the urbanity with which yon accept, the public offices. When a desirable place falls vacant in almost any department of the government we disinterested lookers-on down in Suffolk and thereabouts immediately say to ourselves, " What Springfield man will have that place?" And when it goes to a Springfield man it is but just to you to say that we always acquiesce in the propriety of the choice. I can see at this table at least two of your distinguished townsmen on whom the mark of destiny seems already to be set. How fortunate it would have been if this anniversary had fallen one year later, when you probably could have graced your feast with a lientenant-governor and a president of the Senate of your own production, instead of having to fall back on an imported article! And speaking of imports I am naturally reminded of the cloud, no larger, indeed, than a man's hand, and not likely to be larger, the only cloud that dims the brilliancy of your prospects to-day, even by a passing shadow, cast by the late refusal of the Presi- dent of the United States to allow Springfield the empty honors and scanty emoluments of a port of delivery. Don't let that disturb you. Your distinguished fellow-citizen, the district attorney, has already pointed out to you that the denial of that boon is really a blessing in disguise. What are ports of delivery? There are hundreds of them, some hardly known even by name. " A breath can make them, as a breath has made." But there is only one Springfield. This splendid city, with all its wealth of character, association, and material prosperity, is yours still, and yours it will remain, while ports of delivery come and go unheeded.
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You do not depend on the favor of Presidents. You can afford to laugh at a veto. The energy and enterprise which have made Springfield what she is to-day, a monument of New England prosperity and an embodiment of the New England idea, will carry her on unchecked by accidents of fortune to new achievements and new glories in the future, and the congratulations and good wishes of the whole people of the Commonwealth will attend her onward march.
Mr. LATHROP. - The Press. - To respond to this toast, I am pleased to pre- sent a gentlemen who, by inheritance and by instinct, by education and accom- plishment, most fitly illustrates and localizes this sentiment, - Mr. Samuel Bowles.
Mr. BOWLES. - Mr. Toast-master and Gentlemen, - For three generations my family have been engaged in the newspaper business in Springfield, and there appears to be some danger that a representative of the fourth generation may grow up to pursue the same calling. It has been one of the unwritten but respected rules of the house never to make a public speech. I felt, therefore, that I was running the risk of a hostile encounter with the shades of my an- cestors in accepting the invitation of the banquet committee to respond to the present toast this evening. But the call so stirred my pride in my heritage and my profession, that I could not decline it.
After the eloquent exaltation of the press by your accomplished toast-master, little remains to be said in its behalf. The history of the press in Springfield, it may be claimed, without boasting, is a highly honorable one; and the news- papers of the town have at least done their share in promoting its material growth and preserving its moral health. The marvellous development in the character and functions of our local journals, that has taken place within the century that compasses their history, has been confined almost entirely to the last fifty years, the period during which the telegraph, the railroad, and the steamship have broken down the barriers that formerly separated towns and States and continents, and brought every part of the civilized world into quick communication with every other part. During this time, too, there has gone on a wonderful improvement in printing machinery, enabling us now to circulate the news of the day with a completeness and promptitude that would have been considered magical fifty years ago. The celebration of the two hundredth anni- versary of the settlement of Springfield occurred on a Wednesday. On the following Saturday the local papers appeared with reports of the event, filling only three or four columns of space, and consisting largely of the letters from distinguished men read at the public dinner, and the toasts that were offered.
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In an editorial paragraph the enterprising conductor of one of the papers said, " We think we shall be able in our next to give our readers the entire speeches of his Excellency, of the Adjutant-General, and of Colonel Winthrop." This would be ten days after the speeches were delivered. Mark the difference be- tween that time and this! To-day our daily papers can hardly wait for the speeches to be spoken, or events to happen, before they are offering their readers full and accurate reports of what has been said or what has occurred.
A number of the foremost citizens of Springfield in the past have been more or less intimately associated with local journalism, and become a part of its history. William B. Calhoun, who honorably represented this part of the State in Congress at the time of our two hundredth anniversary, and was a man of a high order of ability, contributed liberally to the editorial columns of the local press. So, less frequently, did that rare companion and gifted lawyer, George Ashmun, whose handsome presence especially graced occasions like this. The brilliant and genial William Stowe, whom many of us remember with pleasure, was a regularly employed editor of one of the local journals. Ex-Mayor Will- iam L. Smith, also, to whose good taste and intelligent management, as chair- man of the citizens' committee, the success of this celebration is so largely due, was an able editor in his younger days, and would have responded for the profession this evening but for his frail health. That admirable and useful moral teacher, Dr. J. G. Holland, was another worker in the ranks of whom the fra- ternity in Springfield will ever feel peculiarly proud. These and others like them, men of position, of power, of conscience, and character. have made the press of Springfield what it is to-day. Let us hope that their successors, in the present and coming generations, will seek to emulate their virtues, and to ad- minister worthily the larger trust, the heavier responsibility which the oppor- tunities of modern journalism lay upon them.
Dr. THOMAS R. PYNCHON, of Hartford, Conn., responding to the toast "The first three magistrates of Springfield," said : -
Mr. President and Gentlemen of Springfield, - I need not say that it gives me the greatest pleasure to be present on this occasion, for though our branch of the Pynchon family established themselves upon the beautiful shores of Long Island Sound nearly one hundred and fifty-eight years ago, yet we have always regarded Springfield as the ancient home of our race, and taken the deepest interest in its prosperity, welfare, and success, and it is with feelings of no ordinary satis- faction that I rise to say a few words on behalf of my distinguished ancestor and his faithful friends, and attempt to justify his right to the title of Worship-
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ful, by which he is generally known in history. In order to do this I must take a brief survey of his career, for his life, from the beginning to the end, was a busy and eventful one.
At this time, two hundred and fifty years ago, May 25, 1636, he was only fif- teen years of age, having been born at Springfield, in Essex, England, in 1621. He was, therefore, only nine years old when he was brought by his father to America, together with his mother and his three sisters, in the ship " Jewell," one Hurlston, master, in company with the other vessels of the fleet that bore the Massachusetts charter to this side of the Atlantic. About ten of the clock, Easter Monday, those vessels weighed anchor at Cowes, Isle of Wight, and on Monday, the 14th day of the following June, they cast those same anchors in the inner harbor of Salem, in Massachusetts. In the course of a very few days they sailed again and landed their company at the confluence of two rivers, near the bottom of Massachusetts Bay. Winthrop planted himself at Charlestown, but Pynchon, almost immediately, removed to Roxbury, where we find him in the early part of July of the same year, and where he built a house, beautifully situated on rising ground sloping towards the east, afterwards sold to Governor Dudley and now oeeupied by the Universalist church.
Hence the worshipful major, being now, as I have said, about nine years of age, first made his acquaintance with the great wilderness and with the eopper- colored savages, in whose future history he was destined to play such an im- portant part. In the course of that summer, his mother dying, he passed into the care of his sisters, who were considerably older than himself, and a little later into the hands of Mrs. Frances Sanford, a grave matron of the church at Dorchester, whom his father married within a year. Of early schooling the worshipful major probably had not much, but what he had, no doubt, came from Rev. John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, who arrived from England in 1631, and became the first minister of Roxbury, and from him he probably acquired that interest in the Indians and that knowledge of their character which was one of his leading characteristics during the whole of his life.
Two hundred and fifty years ago it was a hurried and busy time in that house- hold at the foot of the Rocksborough cliffs. On the 22d of April his father had returned from his first trip, that season, to the Connecticut river, in order to ex- pedite the loading of the " Blessing of the Bay," as he wrote to John Winthrop, Jr., at Saybrook, at the river's mouth. On May 14 he was again at Springfield, and on July 4 was back once more at Roxbury. By July 15 he was once more in Spring- field, and the probability is that it was between these last two dates the family was moved, and that somewhere about the 8th or 9th of July the youthful major, being, as I have said, about fifteen years of age, gained his first sight of the Con-
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neetient river, from the elevated point where the Bay path emerges, upon the top of the hill to the eastward of the town, and caught his first glimpse of its mag- nificent curves as it sweeps through the fields of Longmeadow, and that he pres- ently found himself established in the little wooden house that had been built for the accommodation of the family, not far from the river's bank, and close by the very spot on which we are now assembled. Here, no doubt, he enjoyed for schooling the instructions of the Rev. George Moxon, and in his out-of-door life sailed up and down the river from South Hadley Falls to Enfield, and assisted in trapping beaver at Woronoco and in loading his father's vessels at Warehouse Point, and daily became more deeply interested in the dusky men who constantly thronged his father's house ; and, no doubt, was present when a deputation of the Mohawks from the great river on the other side of the western mountains waited upon his father in order to present to him the scalp of Sassacus, the great Pequod chief, who had fied to them for safety, and which by him was carried to Gov- ernor Winthrop on his next visit to the Bay, together with his bloody hands. And in this school of business and affairs passed away nine more years. Then comes his marriage, October 30, 1645, to Amy, the daughter of Gov. George Wyllys, of Hartford, and the owner of the famous Charter Oak.
Four years after, in 1650, when he was twenty-nine years of age, occurred the publication of his father's book, " The Meritorious Price of our Redemption," and two years later, his return to England. Immediately after followed his own entrance upon eivil and military life, as chief magistrate of the settlement and commander of the troops. Presently came the preparations, in 1658, for the erection of his great brick house, the Fort. During all this period prosperity flowed steadily in, and wealth accumulated. From Enfield and Suffield on the south, to the meadows of Deerfield on the north, most of the land was purchased by him, or through him, of the Indians, and nearly all subsequent titles are from him derived. Nor were his possessions confined to the Connecticut river valley, for we find him owning land in the Narragansett country, two thousand four hundred acres, between the Thames and Mystic rivers, to the east of New London.
In 1662 occurred his father's death, and the year following he visited England to settle the estate. In 1675 came King Philip's War, with all its anxieties, fatigues, and horrors, culminating in the burning of his settlement in October of that year. In 1679 we discover him assisting officially, as one of the assistants of the colony, at the imposing funeral of Governor Leverett in Boston. In 1680 we find him despatched to Albany with instructions from the General Court to get the advice and assistance of the Hon. Sir Edmund Andros, Governor of New York, to endeavor a treaty with the Schems and people called Mohawks, and they remind
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him of his former visit to Albany, and their meeting him some four years before. No doubt in both journeys he followed the trail up the Westfield river over the mountains, and was thus the pioneer of the great iron road that now follows the same route, from his settlement to the same point.
In 1659 began his legislative career, as a deputy from Springfield to the General Court. From 1665 to 1686, when the government under the old charter came to an end, he was one of the Assistants, or Upper House. In 1686 we find him named by the Crown as one of the Councillors under Sir Edmund Andros's government of all New England. And finally, in 1703, when he was eighty-two years of age, and about one year after the accession of Queen Anne, and toward the beginning of the grand career of the great Duke of Marlborough, on the 17th day of January, he died, and was buried with great pomp a few days after- ward on the banks of the Connecticut, which he had loved so well, and, as it were, under the shadow of Mt. Tom. The Rev. Solomon Stoddard, of North- ampton, preached the sermon, entitled " God's power shown in the death of useful men." He describes him as a man having great influence abroad as well as at home. It was the general feeling that a great man had indeed fallen in Israel.
Ou reviewing his career. we perceive plainly that from 1650 to 1702, a period of more than fifty years. he was constantly engaged in public affairs. He was honorable, and had great influence upon men of authority abroad. This is Mr. Stoddard's language, and he could not have had such a career if he had not possessed in an eminent degree those qualities which always command the respect of mankind. And in this career he was powerfully supported by his brother-in-law, Elizur Holyoke, and by Samuel Chapin, whom you have very justly associated with him in your remarks, and who was possessed of similar sterling qualities. He is said to have been much trusted and beloved by the Indians, and to have continued the wise policy of treating them that was com- menced by his father. Of this there is a notable proof in a letter from Jonathan Edwards, at Stockbridge, iu May, 1751, in which he says "that the Mohawks desired that in future interviews and conferences, Brigadier Dwight and Colonel Pynchon might be improved, and as to Colonel Pynchon in particular, they urged their acquaintance with his ancestors, and their experience of their integrity." This I have always regarded as the finest compliment ever paid to the family, and its highest claim to distinction.
The Brigadier Dwight here mentioned was the celebrated Gen. Joseph Dwight, who commanded at Louisburg and Lake George, the ancestor of the Berkshire Dwights and of the Sedgwicks, and the brother of Col. Josiah Dwight, of Springfield. The Colonel Pynchon must have been, I think, my great-great- grandfather, William Pynchon, who married for his wife Catharine Brewer, the
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daughter of one of your early ministers ; or else his brother, John Pynchon, who married the daughter of the Rev. Edward Taylor, of Westfield.
My conception of him is, that he was a wise, sagacious, sympathizing. honor- able, high-minded, religious, and friendly man, of immense capacity for business, a brave and energetic commander, a prudent connsellor, and possessed of all the qualities, the confidence, the affection, and love of men. He was, I think, a very different man from his father. Ilis father was a great scholar and author, and a well-read lawyer, a man of a statesmanlike mind, a man who could conceive and assist in executing the plan of bringing the charter to this country, and of founding a new State. These great qualities are clearly shown in his letters to Governor Winthrop, printed in the transactions of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The son was possessed of the administrative qualities necessary to carry on a government that had been already founded.
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